‘That, my dear,’ Mr Dupuy responded blandly, looking at her with parental fondness, ‘is a question on which I venture to think myself far better qualified to form an opinion than a mere girl of barely twenty. Tom and I have arranged between us, as I have often already pointed out to you, that the family estates ought on all accounts to be reunited in your persons. As soon as you are twenty-two, my dear, we propose that you should marry. Meanwhile, it can only arouse unseemly differences within the family to discuss the details of the question prematurely. I have made up my mind, and will not go back upon it. A Dupuy never does. As to this young Mr Noel who’s coming from Barbadoes, I shall go down myself to the next steamer, and look out to offer him our hospitality immediately on his arrival, before any coloured people—I mention no names—can seize upon the opportunity of intercepting him, and carrying him off forcibly against his will, bag and baggage, to their own dwelling-places.’
SOME RUSTIC NAMES OF FLOWERS.
Who does not love the country names of old-fashioned flowers better than those by which botanists and florists call them? By old-fashioned flowers—if forms perennially renewed can ever be called old-fashioned—are meant the flowers our oldest poets praise, and whose simple charms find a place in the songs of modern ones—flowers, the roots of which the old Flemings and the proscribed of Nantes brought with them in their enforced migration to this country, and which, like the industries they introduced, flourished into brighter bloom and strength than in the Fatherland. Some of the rustic names of these old flowers have a quaint prettiness and meaning in them, like the pet names of little children, which are at once piquant and endearing; and as some are local, others little known, and others, again, nearly obsolete, and likely to be wholly so in another generation or two, one is interested in endeavouring to preserve them.
The ‘Falfalaries’ (checkered snake’s head) of old Shropshire people are properly spoken of by their children’s children as ‘Fritillaries;’[1] and bright-looking blushful ‘Pretty Betty,’ indigenous to the Kentish chalk, and familiar to many persons by this name, is now, thanks to botany and Board Schools, correctly known as ‘Red Valerian.’ We, however, who have known it from childhood by its homelier name, will know it by no other; for us, it will always be ‘Pretty Betty,’ and suggestive of the high bloom on the hypothetical maiden’s cheek in honour of whom it was so named. In Chaucer’s time, it was crudely called ‘Setwale,’ or ‘Set-a-wall,’ from its well-known habit of cresting old castles and other crumbling walls, and of growing above gray posterns and old garden-gates, whence, from the tender ‘Good-nights’ not unusual at such places, it probably got its Shropshire name of ‘Kiss-at-the-wicket,’ and its Surrey synonym, ‘Kiss-behind-the-garden-gate.’ The variegated ‘Ribbon-grass’ of our gardens, anciently called—but that was when the rood of Boxley flourished, and village maidens, knowing no other literature, read their saints’ calendar in flowers—‘Our Lady’s Laces,’ had become, when Parkinson wrote, ‘Painted’ or ‘Ladies’ Laces,’ which makes all the difference. In many places it has the common name of ‘Gardener’s Garters;’ but in a corner of Kent not far from the Weald, where many old-world ways and words are cherished, it has the pretty, pert, but apposite one of ‘Match-me-if-you-can’—a name that prompted the examination of a dozen blades of it, only to discover that, by some exquisite diversity of arrangement of the creamy white and pale-green stripes, not one of the delicately striated leaves exactly resembled another.
‘I won’t have it called “London-pride,”’ said the eighty-year-old proprietress of a garden, once fuller of bloom and colour and sweetness than any other we have known; but that was before sight failed its owner. ‘What have we country-folk and simple flowers to do with “London-pride?” For my part, I like it best by its old Kentish name of “None-so-pretty.”’ If any doubt the fitness of the sobriquet, let them take the trouble to microscopically examine the minute painted and jewelled corolla of this flower, and assure themselves how truly it deserves the appellation.
No country garden is without ‘Honesty,’ or ‘White Satin-flower’ as it is sometimes called, from the silvery lustre of its large circularly shaped saliques, which, when dried, were used to dress up fireplaces in summer, and decorate the chimney-mantels of cottages and village inns. Our aged friend had another name for this plant also, and called it ‘Money-in-both-pockets.’ The curious seed-vessels, which grow in pairs, and are semi-transparent, show the flat disc-shaped seeds like little coins within them, an appearance which no doubt originated the name.
Reminiscent of the times to which we just now alluded, when holy names hung about the hedgerows, and the blossoming of plants recalled sacred seasons and events, the lilac in Devonshire bears the name of ‘Whitsuntide Flower;’ the country-people know it by no other. There Cardamine pratensis, Shakspeare’s ‘Lady-smocks,’ the ‘Cuckoo-flower’ of old Gerarde, whose blossoms border the streams and rivulets in spring ‘all silver-white,’ like lengths of bleaching linen, is known as ‘Milkmaids;’ and in the same county the ‘Foxglove’ becomes ‘Folk’s-glove’ or ‘Fairy-glove;’ while in Ireland, children call the drooping tubular freckled bells ‘Fairy thimbles,’ and are careful not to meddle with them after sunset, on pain of being pinched by the ‘good-people.’
The milk-white ‘Candytuft’ (Iberis amara) grows plentifully on stony upland fields in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Once, in the latter county, when we were gathering some of it from a field in which some women were weeding, one of them remarked to another that she should not have liked to have done so when she was a young woman; upon which we inquired its name, and was told, almost reluctantly, ‘Poverty’—a most expressive name; for it loves best a poor and arid soil, and has its botanical name from its intense bitterness. Evidently, village lads and lasses had from early times an unwritten language of flowers, and this was one of its phrases.
As our readers know, ‘Pansy’ is a very old name for the ‘Heart’s-ease,’ as old at least as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and probably older. Spenser writes of the ‘pretty pauncy;’ and Ophelia gives it ‘for thought.’ It is a plant of many names. Shakspeare twice calls it ‘Love-in-idleness.’ Poor, simple, pious folk, seeing its three lower petals rayed like a ‘glory,’ called it ‘Herb of the Trinity.’ The vagrant habit of the plant procured it the name of ‘Kit-run-the-streets,’ which appellation it has not wholly lost in country-places. Rustics also call it ‘Two-faces-under-a-hood.’ But it was as ‘Heart’s-ease’ we first knew it, a name that gives sweet force to that other old-world one, ‘Call-me-to-you,’ which without it had been meaningless.
Of local names for flowers, one of the prettiest we know is that by which a Dorsetshire girl designated the ‘Michaelmas Daisy’—a name full of unconscious poetry; she called it ‘Summer’s Farewell.’ ‘We shall not have many more nosegays this year, ma’am; I see “Summer’s Farewell” is blowing;’ and upon desiring to see the unknown flower, she pointed out the familiar ‘Michaelmas Daisy.’